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Ellie Chowns's Climate-related Tweets, Speeches & Votes

We've found the following climate-related tweets, speeches & votes by Ellie Chowns in the last 90 days

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• 15 Sep 2026: Parliamentary Speech

  It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Alloa and Grangemouth (Brian Leishman), who made a passionate and utterly convincing case for the need for a green energy revolution and the benefits it would provide not only environmentally, but socially for the communities we are here to represent. We have heard fantastic arguments from across the House for a full ban on fracking. It is not just about the earthquake risks and the environmental damage to local communities, or because it is completely publicly unpopular, as the hon. Member for Scarborough and Whitby (Alison Hume) pointed out. British citizens do not want fracking, and banning fracking fully is a very popular policy. Fundamentally, however, there is one key reason why we must have a full ban on fracking, which is that we must keep fossil fuels in the ground. We know that we live in a hugely warming world.

  Full debate: Fracking Ban

  Fossil fuels are traded globally. If we open up new production of fossil fuels, the reality is that that will do nothing for bills, do almost nothing for energy security and be a complete distraction from the investments we must make in the transition to the clean, green, renewable energy future that is our only hope of a sustainable economy not just in the long term, but in the short and medium terms. These are the industries of the future, and people who argue that we should continue to invest in typewriters during the era of the personal computer or continue to invest in horses and carriages during the era of the car are simply stuck in the past. We cannot continue to have our heads in the sand.

  Full debate: Fracking Ban

  Yes, seriously. I can give the hon. Member the reference, unlike for the extraordinary statistics he cited in his speech, which apparently have no basis in actual evidence. Fundamentally, we have to stop pouring fossil fuel on the fire of the climate crisis, and that means we need a full ban on fracking.

  Full debate: Fracking Ban

  Fundamentally, renewables are the cheap, clean, green energy of the future, and we need to shift in that direction as quickly as possible. We are here talking about fracking, but there is no commercially viable shale gas reserve in the entirety of the UK.

  Full debate: Fracking Ban

  Fundamentally, we are living in a burning world. The 11 hottest years on record were the past 11 years. The three hottest years on record were the past three years. The trajectory is going up and up, and this is not just a question of graphs on paper and reports from the World Meteorological Organisation; we are feeling it in our communities. The Prime Minister, when he considers decisions on things like fracking, should listen to communities in places such as Stourbridge, West Sussex and Stoke-on-Trent, where people have had their homes burned by wildfires that have been supercharged by the climate change that is already built in. It would be utterly irresponsible to pour yet more fuel on the fire of climate crisis.

  We need to recognise the reality that is hitting us in the face: a barrelling and accelerating climate crisis. We need to do everything we can to change direction, and the very least of those things has to be a full ban on fracking. Can the Minister confirm that when the energy independence Bill comes to this House after the recess, it will include a fulfilment of the Government?s previous promise to implement a full and statutory ban on fracking that cannot simply be overturned by ministerial diktat? Will he apply the ban to existing licences? We have to leave fossil fuels in the ground and supercharge our transition to the green, clean energy revolution, which is the only fundamental basis for a sustainable and prosperous future for all of the UK.

  Full debate: Fracking Ban

• 3 Sep 2026: Parliamentary Speech

  We have seen just recently what ecosystem collapse looks like: collapsing glaciers in the Himalayas and horrific loss of life on Nepal-Tibet border. We see what it looks like in the UK: the hottest ever summer and the worst ever arable harvest. Things are only going to get worse. This is clearly an issue of national security, and the security services themselves are raising the alarm, not just the environmentalists. We have to change course. Farmers in my constituency of North Herefordshire see this on a daily basis. We have to change the conversation about national security and recognise that it is not just about investment in weaponry and conflict, but about acknowledging the true, existential risk posed by climate change and ecosystem collapse, both in UK and across the world, as highlighted in this report.

  It is disappointing that this short report had to be dragged out of the Government, kicking and screaming, and published only after a huge amount of pressure. Where is the evidence base underlying it? What are the Government afraid to share with us? Will the Government publish the full report and the evidence base that underlies it? If they will not, why not? Will they recognise that ecosystems are critical national infrastructure and have to be addressed as such? To echo a point made by the hon. Member for Chesterfield (Mr Perkins), will the Government recognise that we cannot wait another few years for the national adaptation plan, given today’s announcement from the World Meteorological Organisation that climate change is supercharging natural phenomena such as El Niño, which will lead to even worse effects in the UK and globally than we saw this summer? Nature security is national security.

  Full debate: Global Biodiversity and Ecosystems: National Security

• 3 Sep 2026: Parliamentary Speech

  We cannot discuss this issue without recognising that the climate breakdown is already costing us hugely: the hottest summer ever, the worst arable harvest ever, and the Met Office says that it was 130 times more likely that we faced this crisis this year. Just today, the World Meteorological Organisation has said that climate breakdown is super-charging natural phenomena such as El Niño. The shadow Secretary of State says that North sea communities need a new direction: yes, a just transition to clean energy for the future, not the dirty energy of the old. Will the Minister recognise that the climate damage created by Rosebank and Jackdaw will hugely outweigh any potential economic benefits and therefore rule them out? Fossil fuels must stay in the ground if we are to have a liveable future.

  Full debate: Jackdaw and Rosebank Oil and Gas Fields

• 2 Sep 2026: Parliamentary Speech

  We are also facing the climate crisis barrelling down towards us. All of these issues require stronger co-operation with our closest neighbours. In that context, more than 10 years on from this disastrous wrong turn in British politics—this monumental act of self-harm—it is time to change course. I welcome the noises that the Government have made about resetting. That is certainly a start, but we need to be honest about what we have lost. We need to recognise the importance of co-operation and working together politically as well as economically. We need to recognise that the majority of the British people think that we would be better off back in the European Union, and that is why I believe we need to set out a path to rejoin. The best future for the UK lies within Europe. With the summit coming up, I hope that the Minister will be genuinely ambitious and deep in setting out the path forward.

  Full debate: EU Membership Referendum: Impact on the UK

• 1 Sep 2026: Parliamentary Speech

  The climate crisis is hitting hard already, and I was glad to hear the Prime Minister acknowledge that in his statement. We have just had the hottest summer since records began, farmers are facing the worst arable harvest since records began and the Met Office tells us today that extreme summers such as this year’s have been made 130 times more likely by burning fossil fuels. In that context, will the Prime Minister remember his words of last year, when he warned against the “siren voices” taking us down the path of “dependence on fossil fuels”? Will he stick to the manifesto promise not to drill any more oil and gas, and will he rule out Rosebank and Jackdaw, because the climate damage they would create hugely outweighs any possible benefit and will lead to more disasters such as we saw on the Nepal-Tibet border just last week?

  Full debate: Direction of Government

• 14 Jul 2026: Parliamentary Speech

  I represent North Herefordshire, an absolutely beautiful constituency with farming at its heart. Farmers are at the forefront of the impacts of climate change—not just extreme heat but other weather extremes such as flooding. As my hon. Friend the Member for Waveney Valley pointed out, we are facing a situation in which climate change, or climate breakdown, is driving the increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events. As he pointed out, we have known about this for decades, but sadly Governments have effectively been asleep at the wheel on reducing climate-warming emissions to the level we need them at, and particularly on adaptation and building our resilience.

  Full debate: Extreme Heat: Preparedness

  We need to change our ways as a country. Experts have been telling us this for a long time. The Committee on Climate Change has pointed out that we are not doing anywhere near enough to meet the adaptation challenge facing us. I call on the Government to grasp the nettle. This is investment in building a better future—it is a win-win investment. Building houses that are suitable for the weather conditions that we will be facing is much cheaper than having to retrofit them afterwards. If we use materials and building methods that enable us to cool buildings naturally, we can create urban areas that are not such huge heat islands as they currently are. By building in such a way, including with lots of tree planting in urban areas, we can cool temperatures locally using natural methods. We have a real opportunity here, and we should grasp it with both hands. Tackling the adaptation and the resilience challenge is not about just sticking our finger in the dyke or using a sticking plaster approach, such as patchwork retrofitting air-con in every building that is struggling with the heat; it is an opportunity to imagine and to build a better country for the future.

  I raised this in Health questions this morning, but the issues we face are not solved just by retrofitting our hospitals. We have to enable everybody in the country to stay healthy in the extremes of heat that we are increasingly seeing so that they do not have to go into hospital in the first place. This is a cross-Government requirement and priority, so will the Government put in place adaptation plans that the Climate Change Committee will itself declare are fit for purpose?

  Finally, we must put the brakes on the problem at the same time. It is not an either/or between mitigation and adaptation; we still have more to do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and the emissions that are causing climate breakdown, so that we save ourselves from the worst possible effects of runaway climate change. I call on the Government to go further and faster on real climate action, not least by holding the line on Jackdaw and Rosebank. We cannot on the one hand struggle with facing the consequences of climate change, such as extreme heat, and on the other hand continue to take more fossil fuels out of the ground and burn them. We need consistent Government policy across the piece. I hope the Government will provide that.

  Full debate: Extreme Heat: Preparedness

• 14 Jul 2026: Parliamentary Speech

  Heatwaves, which are becoming more frequent and more severe due to the climate crisis, create a health crisis. We see that in excessive temperatures in our hospitals and other health buildings, and we see it in the huge, unprecedented demand on ambulance services. First, will the Minister support my colleague Hannah Spencer’s private Member’s Bill to set a maximum workplace temperature to help keep people healthy during heatwaves? Secondly, what conversations is the Department having with the Cabinet Office to ensure that we have a Government-wide adaptation and resilience plan to deal with the effects of climate breakdown?

  Full debate: NHS Buildings: Extreme Heat

• 13 Jul 2026: Parliamentary Speech

  The climate crisis is upon us. We in the UK are now in the midst of our third heatwave in less than three months. Communities have endured sweltering conditions that have put huge pressure on our NHS, our infrastructure and our natural environment. Our ambulance service has never been so busy. Tragically, lives have been lost as people have sought relief from the heat in rivers and lakes. Today, we have heard that it is estimated that there were 2,700 excess deaths due to just the May and June heatwaves. In my constituency, dozens of schools have had to close due to overheating. People are sweltering in hospitals, care homes and many other workplaces, and farmers and communities alike are facing critical water shortages.

  Extreme heat is no longer an occasional inconvenience, and neither are extreme storms and floods; they are now part of everyday life, and we know that things are getting worse. If we are serious about protecting future generations from climate breakdown, every sector must play its part in reducing emissions. Today I will focus on one sector that is rarely discussed, despite having an environmental footprint unlike any other.

  Full debate: Embodied Carbon: Buildings

  It is clear that the construction industry has a huge impact on both climate change and biodiversity loss. We rightly spend time discussing how efficiently buildings operate once they are occupied, but we spend remarkably little time discussing the emissions that occur before anybody even walks through the front door of a new building. Those emissions are known as embodied carbon—that is, the greenhouse gases emitted when we extract raw materials, process them into building materials and use them for construction.

  According to the UK Green Building Council, embodied carbon accounts for around 20% of the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions and is expected to account for fully half of the built environment’s emissions by 2035. Bizarrely, though, it has so far been ignored by central Government policy. Building regulations only set limits on a subset of operational emissions. The Government’s new future homes standard ignores embodied carbon and only tackles energy use in new homes, which is a small fraction of the total emissions from the built environment. The standard is silent on material use, construction processes and embodied carbon. These are not marginal omissions—they are large gaps in UK climate policy. The Environmental Audit Committee pointed this out several years ago, as have experts for years and years.

  I commend those councils for their ambition—they recognise the urgency of climate action and are taking real, tangible action. However, the consequence is fragmentation. Different authorities are adopting different reporting templates, different thresholds, different assessment requirements and different policy wording. As such, national house builders and developers are being forced to navigate an increasingly complex patchwork of local rules. They have to learn a new set of rules every time they build in a different local authority. Planning officials are duplicating work, and local authorities are developing parallel systems. Everyone is investing time and money in solving the same problem dozens of times over. The Government would not leave local authorities to tackle other aspects that are fundamental to building design, such as fire safety or equality. Those areas have national minimum standards that authorities can build on, so why are carbon emissions not treated the same? Do we not take climate breakdown as seriously as safety or equality?

  Full debate: Embodied Carbon: Buildings

  As the Environmental Audit Committee highlighted in its 2022 report, “Building to net zero: costing carbon in construction”, regulating embodied carbon would be

  The encouraging news is that the construction sector is not waiting for Government. For more than four years, more than 250 organisations from across the built environment sector have supported a campaign called “Part Z”, named after the various other parts of the building regulations. They have been calling for national embodied carbon regulation. Those companies are not asking the Government to invent something entirely new. Indeed, the same experts who developed “Part Z” have now produced the UK net zero carbon buildings standard, a ready-made framework that provides a practical route to compliance. It builds on the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors’ whole-life carbon assessment methodology, one of the most developed embodied carbon methodologies in the world. These documents could form the basis of future regulatory reporting requirements and, in time, a new approved document. The Government do not need to start from scratch; the construction industry has already done much of the hard work.

  Full debate: Embodied Carbon: Buildings

  Today, I ask the Minister for one thing above all else: national leadership. I ask for a clear pathway towards national regulation to measure and reduce embodied carbon, aligned with the direction already being taken by many of our international partners and by many in the construction industry. I ask that embodied carbon is finally recognised within national planning policy, replacing today’s fragmented patchwork with one coherent national approach. I ask the Government to consider using the UK net zero carbon buildings standard as the route to fast-tracking the compliance requirements, finally giving industry the certainty it has been requesting for years. When will the Government finally release their long-delayed circular economy growth plan, which could deal with embodied carbon at its core?

  Climate change is not hanging around, as we can see around us all the time, and embodied carbon is only making things worse. We can and must change that. We have the expertise, the methodology and the support from industry. Local authorities are crying out for consistency, and the standards have already been written—the only thing missing is national leadership. I call on the Minister to provide it.

  Full debate: Embodied Carbon: Buildings

• 29 Jun 2026: Parliamentary Speech

  Another key threat to our country’s security and resilience, which does not receive nearly enough attention, is climate breakdown. It is not just the environmentalists but the ambulance workers who say that, and the Joint Intelligence and Security Committee’s national security assessment itself says that ecosystem breakdown poses a clear threat to national security. The Committee on Climate Change has pointed out that we are woefully ill-prepared as a country for the effects of climate breakdown.

  We urgently need to take more action to avoid causing climate change. Equally, we urgently need to take far more action to recognise the threat to our national security and resilience posed by the effects of climate breakdown. That was brought home to us in hugely clear terms last week, as we faced the second major heatwave of the last month or so. That heatwave led to record call-outs for the ambulance service—even more than under covid.

  Full debate: Cabinet Office

  The Committee on Climate Change—the Government’s independent adviser—has set out repeatedly that these solutions are available and has set out the things that we need to put forward. The Committee has also set out repeatedly, as have any number of people over any number of years, the fact that the costs of inaction far exceed those of action. The hon. Member for Warwick and Leamington (Matt Western) made that point previously in relation to other security challenges, and it applies with knobs on to tackling the challenge of climate breakdown. Twenty years ago, Professor Nick Stern set out clearly that the costs of inaction far outweigh—many times over—the costs of action to address these risks. After 20 years of our heads collectively being in the sand as a country, we are reaping the whirlwind of that inaction.

  We need to develop a comprehensive extreme heat strategy, a national drought plan and a farmer-led transition to climate-resilient food production. Our farmers are crying out for that support, and they too are on the frontline of the security and resilience challenges that the reality of climate breakdown places on us. We need to strengthen our transport infrastructure, energy infrastructure and water infrastructure. Last week, we heard about nuclear power stations going offline in France. Train companies were saying that nobody should travel unless it was a matter of life and death. Water shortages are becoming more and more frequent. The collective, long-term and strategic approach to tackling climate resilience must be a core plank of national security.

  Tackling climate breakdown is not just an environmental issue but a central plank of security and national resilience. The costs of inaction far outweigh the costs of taking action now. Will the Minister commit to putting in place a national strategy? Will there be an individual identified in the Cabinet Office who leads on it? Does she recognise that we must invest now or pay far worse costs later?

  Full debate: Cabinet Office

  The Minister has not mentioned climate change. Climate change is not a natural hazard; it is a human-made major risk.

  Full debate: Cabinet Office

  One of the key points that I tried to get across in my speech is that this has to be a whole-of-Government effort. DEFRA cannot put in place a strategy to adapt the health service to the reality of climate change. It cannot put in place a strategy to adapt our schools, our transport infrastructure or our energy infrastructure to the reality of climate change. Does the Minister not recognise that this has to be a whole-of-Government effort, and that it is not something that DEFRA can hold? That is precisely why we need a Cabinet Office Minister to lead on climate resilience.

  Full debate: Cabinet Office